Was global trade a mistake?

One week to change the world: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests

Author: D W Gibson

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 354

Price: $19.99
 

How the world ran out of everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain

Author: Peter S Goodman

Publisher: Mariner

Pages: 406

Price: $30

On a cold November morning in 1999, Harold Linde, a member of the Rainforest Action Network, was trying to hang an enormous sign from a construction crane hundreds of feet in the air over downtown Seattle.  After some spiritual assistance from “a circle of pagan witches on the ground” who were “sending prayers up,” Linde and his friends succeeded in unfurling a 100-pound banner. It showed two arrows pointing in opposite directions, one labe­lled “Democracy” and the other “WTO”.

This stunt, which kicked off the Battle of Seattle, a protest of the third ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), captures the combination of high idealism, drama, detailed organisation, radicalism and public relations savvy that defined a movement against the rising tide of globalisation in the decades after the Cold War.

DW Gibson’s comprehensive oral history One Week to Change the World  gives a panoramic view of the multiday festival of dissent, from its authorised marches and semi-legal “direct actions” to its extremely illegal vandalism. There was even a concert.

The WTO’s ministerial meetings were meant to advance the project of knitting together the newly liberalised world with a “harmonisation” of common rules — internationally agreed upon food safety standards, for instance — to lower trade barriers. Ambassadors and NGO officials from around the world had assembled in a city that was fast becoming associated with a new digital economy that promised to accelerate globalisation.

As Gibson outlines, the WTO protests in Seattle became a natural meeting point for a wide range of leftist groups who felt abandoned by the neoliberal turn cemented by the Democratic president in the White House. American union leaders worried that cheap overseas labour would put downward pressure on blue-collar wages and many green activists were concerned that trade liberalisation would be used as a battering ram against domestic environmental protections.

After Seattle, despite further meetings (with much more thought-out security) the WTO was not able to reach another major global trade agreement — and has not to this day. Still, it did provide a framework with its existing rules, and trade liberalisation advanced in the years that followed, thanks to China’s incorporation into the global economic system. The country joined the WTO in 2001 and quickly became the workshop of the world. China’s growing importance within the global economy also set the stage for the great blow to global trade that would arrive two decades later thanks to coronavirus pandemic.

Peter S Goodman’s  How the World Ran Out of Everything  is an impassioned account of globalisation’s rise and stall. Goodman, a long-time economics correspondent for The New York Times  and The Washington Post, offers an expansive view of the modern supply chain, from the Port of Long Beach and long-haul truck routes to cattle ranchers in Montana and the travails of a Mississippi-based toy company trying to get a shipment from China in time for the holiday season.

At every point in the chain during the pandemic, workers faced deteriorating conditions and financial instability. Toilet paper, meat and other consumer goods shot up in price and declined in availability as container ships idled in ports. Goodman argues that the crisis exposed the brittleness of a system that relied, for years, on “just in time” manufacturing, which shrank inventories. This system “worked” in terms of lower prices for consumers and higher market share for these giants. When the pandemic struck, manufacturers with low inventory couldn’t deal with the combination of increased demand and fewer workers, while some middlemen, like the global shippers and meatpackers, were able to profit.

Manufacturers also strained under the odd strength of the Covid-era economy. Americans unable to spend on restaurants and trips took to Amazon and began to vacuum up more stuff made cheap by international trade — televisions, basketball hoops, pastry blenders. “The result of this surge was chaos,” Goodman writes. Lights flickered from power outages “as Chinese plants deployed every available production line”.

Goodman is not naïve enough to think that globalisation can or should be reversed, or that companies seeing political or business risk in China means a renaissance of American manufacturing.

While the global supply chain is unlikely to be dismantled, the ideology of globalisation is under attack practically and politically. “The US is moving towards a kind of nationalistic mercantilism,” Chomsky tells Gibson. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are more similar to each other on trade policy than they are to predecessors in their own parties. Both presidents have shown more interest in using tariffs than in working out trade disputes through the WTO.

The late-20th-century project of integrating China into the global economy, in the hope that economic development would come hand in hand with political liberalism, feels at best misguided. Offshoring resulted in a predictable loss of US jobs, Goodman writes, and programmes designed to help Americans negatively affected by global trade were left underfunded.

What remains to be seen is whether the new policy responses can win over not just American activists and intellectuals, but also consumers who tend to prefer lower costs over all else and who far outnumber any particular group of truckers, cattle ranchers or union workers squeezed by the economic pressures of a long, lean supply chain. The WTO may have lost, but democracy will also have its say.

The reviewer is an economics and climate correspondent for Heatmap News

©2024 The New York Times News Service